createdb

Name

Inputs

Specifies the hostname of the machine on which the
postmaster is running.

-p, --port port

Specifies the Internet TCP/IP port or local Unix domain
socket file extension on which the postmaster is listening for
connections.

-U, --username username

Username to connect as.

-W, --password

Force password prompt.

-e, --echo

Echo the queries that createdb generates and sends to the
backend.

-q, --quiet

Do not display a response.

-D, --location datadir

Specifies the alternate database location for this
database installation. This is the location of the
installation system tables, not the location of this
specific database, which may be different.

-E, --encoding encoding

Specifies the character encoding scheme to be used with
this database.

dbname

Specifies the name of the database to be created. The
name must be unique among all Postgres databases in this
installation. The default is to create a database with the
same name as the current system user.

description

This optionally specifies a comment to be associated
with the newly created database.

Outputs

The comment/description for the database could not be
created. the database itself will have been created
already. You can use the SQL
command COMMENT ON DATABASE to
create the comment later on.

If there is an error condition, the backend error message
will be displayed. See CREATE DATABASE and psql for possibilities.

Description

createdb creates a new
Postgres database. The user who
executes this command becomes the database owner.

createdb is a shell script
wrapper around the SQL command
CREATE DATABASE
via the Postgres interactive
terminal psql. Thus, there
is nothing special about creating databases via this or other
methods. This means that the psql must be found by the script and that a
database server is running at the targeted host. Also, any
default settings and environment variables available to
psql and the libpq front-end library do apply.

Usage

To create the database demo using the
default database server:

$ createdb demo
CREATE DATABASE

The response is the same as you would have gotten from
running the CREATE DATABASESQL command.

To create the database demo using the
postmaster on host eden, port 5000, using the LATIN1 encoding scheme with a look at the
underlying query: